I've often wondered what happened to the female centaurs.

One greets you as you enter David Kane's show at the Eidelauer Picture Club (say this out loud to get the joke). Blond wisps of mane curled around her neck, the centauress clutches her drapery with one hand like a horse-headed Venus de Milo, the other protective on the head of her foal. The foal's ponytail is perked with alarm, arm and belly slack with horror, his eyes sinking into his face like bits of hot coal in marshmallow. In the background, two men direct the burning of an adult male, holding their torches like directional signals on a tarmac. The mother is caught between the firelight that edges one side of her profile and the darkness that shadows her breasts. One of four large paintings in the exhibit, Madonna is both hilarious and tragic: It's the death of Arcadia, framed by Appian pines.

You can't help laughing while Rome burns.

"Farewell to Mars and Other Paintings" is Kane's first show "since all that happened," (meaning his diagnosis, treatment, and recovery from lung and thyroid cancer; check out his public service announcement for HealthTalk). Some of the canvases in the show were begun ten years ago, set aside and picked up again; others are entirely new. Allusions to the battle with cancer can be read throughout the show in saucers, moons and suns that look like cells, in the scorched earth and the struggle of flesh and technology.

In Farewell to Mars, a priapic alien herma gives a three-fingered wave to a trio of flying saucers soaring like so many platelets in the purple skies of a red planet.  It's a hopeful sign.

Kane's painting, as always, is intellectually and pictorially brilliant, going far beyond the personal. He plays with spatial recession, atmospheric effects, and deceptively tight compositions, pulling from 18th-century Venetian vedute painters (think Canaletto), depression-era regionalism (think Benton and Hopper), '50s pulp sci-fi illustration, and apocalyptic fundamentalist religious tracts (rapture merges with alien abduction) to reference classical myth and rationalism, post-war atomic-age conformity, environmental disaster, and the war-ravaged sands of the Middle East.

Classical and Egyptian allusions lurk everywhere: A Lovecraftian tentacle curls pinkly from a triangular crack in a pyramidal structure, one of several that could be temples, bunkers, or bomb shelters, in a small painting entitled In Temple Precinct (Oracle). In others, flying saucers hover over charred landscapes bristling with the remnants of classical architecture, surviving monuments to greatness resembling tombstones. In Siren, a cross between a harpy and a sphinx crouches stonily on a sandy shore off which a nuclear submarine is cruising.

An international consortium of clowns hauls a giant iron clown head across a desert littered with the ruins of other prominent fools, in The Iron Clown. The imagery recalls both Shelley's Ozymandias (and Harrietmandias, as Kane commented), as well as the toppling of Saddam Hassan:  Out with the old clowns, in with the new.

Along with the twenty-one paintings, Kane also offers a series of drawings which seem to draw equally from Picasso, Miro, Zap Comix, and Medieval Celtic manuscript illumination. These are labelled "Benthic Velleities, or Idle Notions from the Bottom of the Sea...From the Depths of the Artistís Imagination, From the Deep Sea Beds of the Unconscious, From the Floor of the Artistís Studio." The description is instructive: Kane is playing with his own brand of surrealism. And while the drawings seem to function as traditional surrealism--freeing access to the unconscious, liberating sexual fantasies and creative impulses--the paintings are something else again.

Unlike much of what has become fashionable as Pop Surrealism, Kane's paintings are anything but glib, shiny, or commercial. Kane's work has developed over decades of working counter to fashion. The work is grounded historically and culturally, rooted in the conditions which created him as a person and as an artist: the intense nationalism of the 1930s that formed the consciousness of his parents' generation, and the blind belief in technology and the march of progress of the post-war era into which he was born. The work presents an authentic lens onto a contemporary culture that is the result of that same constellation.

The Aeronauts (Boulevard du Parc) borrows a play from Bruegel: From a high vantage point, we look out over what could be a Roman villa (think the Getty). A zigzag parapet frames the lower right of the painting, echoed on the left by a couple lounging on the grass: a woman with a low-cut bodice and a man in a W.W.II military uniform. In the far central distance is the grand clouded architecture of a great city, rising out of the misty hills rather like Canaletto's view of London. A number of hot air balloons float in a pink sky. From the nearest, a man has fallen. Like Bruegel's Icarus, the falling body is unseen by the people below who go about their pleasures. In the middle distance, an obelisk in small oval fountain points to the unseen event. It looks like a blinded eye.

As a whole, Kane's work can be read as a critique of the origins and devolution of Western culture. Often this is starkly funny, as in Arrival of the Helveticans, a small painting in which the legacy of the Greeks is relegated to the typeface and silhouetted figures found on restroom doors at Interstate reststops.

At other times, it is almost haunting: A mermaid with the face of a silent film star languishes at the edge of the waves like a roll of sea foam. An approaching storm unites the water and sky in the middle distance, while in the upper left a flying saucer is just visible. At far right, a tiny Hopper-esque figure in yellow oilskins shouts into a megaphone at the empty seas.

Sea Drift, like Madonna, seems to address the loss of the balance between mind and nature, rationality and myth that was the hallmark of ancient Greek culture. When the elimination of myth fails, the rational becomes irrational, centaurs and mermaids replaced in the cultural unconscious with a mythology of technology run wild.

The Eidelauer Picture Club is a provisional space in the remodeled studio and living quarters of Calvin Allison. It's out by Sears and Starbucks in SoDo, with the entrance on Utah Avenue, one block west of 1st.

Kane's show, shockingly, is only up until the end of November.

Be there or be square.

The Eidelauer Picture Club
2203 1st Ave. S.
noon to 6 p.m.
Tuesday through Saturday